As the door of the little cell clanked behind him, the turnkey with scrupulous tenacity bolting the small portal on the outside as rigorously as though it were the last protection of the criminal, Dan sat down on a small stool, and buried his face between his hands. Never before had his fate seemed sodark and gloomy. The little fiction he loved to main-tarn withdrawn, all the intensity of his loneliness stood before him at once. “I may as well say it at once,” muttered he, “when I go back, that Dan Malone has no friend in the wide world, not a man to speak a word for him, but must stand up in the dock and say, ‘No counsel, my lord.’” As if the bitter moment of the humiliation had arrived, the old fellow rocked to and fro in his agony, and groaned bitterly.
What was that which broke the stillness? Was it a sigh, and then a sob? Was his mind wandering? Was the misery too much for his reason? He rubbed his eyes and looked up.
“Merciful Mother! Blessed Virgin! is it yourself is come to comfort me?” cried he, as he dropped on his knees, while the tears streamed down his hard and wrinkled cheeks. “Oh, Holy Mother! Tower of Ivory! do I see you there, or is my ould eyes deceivin’ me?”
The heart-wrung prayer was addressed to a figure on which the solitary pane of a small window high up in the wall threw a ray of sunlight, so that the braided hair glowed like burnished gold, and the pale cheeks caught a slightly warm tint, less like life than like a beautiful picture.
“Don’t you know me, grandfather? Don’t you know your own dear Katey?” said she, moving slowly forward; and then, kneeling down in front of him, clasped him in her arms.
It was more than he could bear, and he heaved a heavy sigh, and rolled back against the wall.
It was long before he rallied; old age stands so near the last threshold, there is but little space to recover breath in; and when he did rally, he could not be sure that his mind was not astray, or that his sight was not deceiving him.
“Tell me something of long ago, darlin’; tell me something, that I’ll know you are my own.”
“Shall I tell you of the day I found the penny in the well, and you told me it was for good luck, and never to lose it? Do you remember, grandfather, how you bored a hole in it, and I used to wear it around my neck with a string?”
“I do, I do,” cried he, as the tears came fast and faster; “and you lost it after all; didn’t you lose it?”